Thursday, 17 January 2013

January Sales

With January sales just passing by; Manchester-based online marketing agency Custard conducted a new survey which showed an amazing 52% of eCommerce shoppers would only make purchases if delivery charges where easily and clearly displayed.

Companies not showing their delivery charges in a crystal clear fashion they could risk missing out on a huge chunk of the January sales revenue.These interesting finding come as industry experts predict that digital sales will be 45% of retailers revenue by next year.

More than 50% of all the surveyed shoppers admitted they would not buy unless they clearly knew what the delivery charges would be. Other results revealed that like me 58% of online shoppers would rather read user reviews than the information provided by the manufacture (24%) or the retailers website (18%).

Text and Images remain the preferred format to relay content to online shoppers and sits comfortably at 66%, however with the growing trend of producing video content one would presume that the consumer base would prefer this media, however only 10% of online shoppers prefer this.

Among those who prefer images and text, nearly 50% make firm purchasing decisions based on pictures that deliver multiple angles or views.

Again user reviews came out top on what online shoppers pay the most attention to when looking for supporting information on product they are considering purchasing.

Managing Director Sam Allcock from Custard’s recommended that any eCommerce site that lacks these key features should invest in some development work to take advantage of the opportunities presented by the January sales. “User reviews build trust among online shoppers and sites that don’t implement them could be missing out on a big chunk of revenue,” he said. “But even with reviews in place, delivery charges come as a nasty surprise when they are only revealed at the checkout stage. “Any good will built up by encouraging product reviews often counts for nothing when hidden charges like delivery and credit card surcharges appear – it leaves a bad taste in the mouth.”